In early August, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Jangwoon “Leo” Lee presented “The h-p Version of Stochastic Galerkin FEM for Stochastic Optimal Control Problems” at the US-Korea Conference 2012 in Los Angeles, Calif.
David Rettinger Named Executive Director of Center for Honor, Leadership and Service
The University of Mary Washington has named David A. Rettinger as executive director of the newly formed Center for Honor, Leadership and Service. Rettinger, a member of UMW’s psychology faculty since 2006, will remain in his role as associate professor.
As executive director, Rettinger will promote collaboration between faculty and student services, develop new programs and coursework and facilitate communication on campus about honor, service and leadership. He also will conduct research on academic integrity and serve as the content expert on honor.
The center aims to enhance and deepen student learning through best practices, educational competency and skill sets for leadership and service grounded in the core value of honor. Starting with the fall semester, the center will involve students in the areas of honor, leadership and service through leadership training and development, an annual leadership conference, honor training, service learning opportunities and immersion experiences, as well as special programs and events throughout the year.
“Honor, leadership and service are at the heart of UMW’s ethos and the center was created with the goal of placing these three virtues at the heart of the Mary Washington experience,” Rettinger said. “Our goal is to provide students with opportunities both within and beyond the curriculum to develop as leaders in pursuit of an honorable life in service to communities great and small.”
Rettinger has been the faculty advisor to the UMW Honor Council since 2008. An expert on moral decision making and academic integrity, his research on student cheating and academic honor issues has been widely published in academic journals, including most recently in Ethics & Behavior and Research in Higher Education.
In February, Rettinger presented “Impulsivity and Emotion: Leveraging Individual Differences to Reduce Cheating” at an international higher education conference in Germany. Also at the conference, Rettinger gave a presentation on UMW’s honor system and honor code.
Rettinger received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
For more information about the Center, visit http://students.umw.edu/chls/.
Stephen Farnsworth Featured on PBS NewsHour
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and Director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies, was a featured guest on PBS NewsHour on Wednesday, August 15.
In the segment “Campaigns Vie for Virginia Voters, Especially Women,” he discusses Virginia’s importance in the upcoming presidential election and explains the role of Northern Virginia voters to the campaigns.
In “Virginia’s Boom Town — and Lots of Votes — Just Outside the Beltway,” Farnsworth explains the political dynamics of Northern Virginia and the strategies each campaign would need to employ to influence voters.
Debra Hydorn Publishes Lesson Plans
Debra Hydorn
As an associate editor for the website Statistics on the Web, Professor of Mathematics Debra Hydorn recently published two lesson plans. Titled “The Taste of Yellow” and “How Long is 30 Seconds?” these lesson plans serve as exemplars that follow the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education from the American Statistical Association and also meet standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Common Core for State Standards for Mathematics Practice.
Bonds’ Article Contests Sustainability Discourses Reliant upon “Green” Technology
Eric Bonds
While some popular and academic discourses endow “green” technology with heroic powers to both rejuvenate our stagnating economy and bring about a more environmentally sustainable society, Eric Bonds and his University of Colorado co-author Liam Downey argue that it is important to place their development, fabrication, and use within a global context of inequitable relationships between nations. The authors did just that by examining three cases of ecological modernization in the automobile industry in an article recently published in the Journal of World-Systems Research. The cases reveal that “green” technologies instituted in wealthy nations are often composed of natural resources extracted from the Global South. Consequently, such technologies have a real capacity to create environmental improvements in wealthy nations, but may also inadvertently increase environmental degradation and human rights abuses experienced by people living near natural resource extraction projects elsewhere on the globe. The article, entitled “Green Technology and Ecologically Unequal Exchange,” can be downloaded at: www.jwsr.org.
Cassandra Good Receives Certification in Editing Historical Documents
Cassandra Good, assistant editor of the Papers of James Monroe, recently attended the National Historical and Public Records Commission’s Institute for Editing Historical Documents , where she received a certification in that field.
Suzanne Sumner Delivers Invited Talk at VCU
Suzanna Sumner
Professor of Mathematics Suzanne Sumner, together with Dr. Wyatt Mangum, adjunct faculty member, recently delivered the invited talk “Worker Bee Aggression towards a Foreign Queen: Modeling from Data” for the Progress on Difference Equations international conference hosted at Virginia Commonwealth University. The talk addressed their continued research into the mathematical modeling associated with the behavior of bees.
Kelli Slunt Serves as Head Mentor for International Competition
Kelli Slunt, professor of chemistry, served as the head mentor for the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad team. Twenty of the brightest high school chemistry students were trained by Slunt, three other mentors, and the faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado this June. Slunt accompanied the top four students to compete at the International Chemistry Olympiad in Washington, D.C. The team performed well, receiving one gold and three silver metals. For more information, see http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/07/South-Korea-Dominates-Chemistry-Olympiad.html.
Debra Hydorn and Kathryn Loesser-Casey Present Poster
Debra Hydorn
Professor of Mathematics Debra Hydorn and Professor of Biology Kathryn Loesser-Casey recently presented the poster “Tennis Balls Four Ways” at the 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings in San Diego, Calif. The poster described an activity on accuracy and precision in research from BIOL 260 The Reserach Process, a course jointly created and taught by Hydorn and Loesser-Casey.
Kathryn Loesser-Casey
Randall Helmstutler Publishes in PRIMUS
Associate Professor of Mathematics Randall Helmstutler recently co-authored an article published in the journal PRIMUS – Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies. The article, “Finite Topological Spaces as a Pedagogical Tool,” looks at the use of finite topological spaces as examples in a point-set topology class especially suited to help students transition into abstract mathematics.